


applause, applause

by Darkfromday



Series: Arc-V Rare Pair Week 2017 [1]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Arc V Rare Pair Week, F/M, M/M, lateposting 2017, prompt fills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 06:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11961852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkfromday/pseuds/Darkfromday
Summary: Prompt fills for Arc-V Rare Pair Week, Day 1: Applause.





	1. audience (ruri/yuuya)

**Author's Note:**

> No, the title is not from the Lady Gaga song. Yes, it is from the Limit attack with Jack Skellington in Kingdom Hearts 2.

Everyone held their breath as Sakaki Yuuya tumbled toward the ground. He had a split second to save himself from severe injury; only by catching the ribbon could he escape unscathed from the trap of spikes, wires and ravenous Duel Monsters forty feet below.

The young entertainer fell faster than a stone, but still had the breath his crowd did not; he whooped for them, reaching out his hands–-

–-and missing the ribbon.

Nearly everyone in the audience shrieked. Among them, Kurosaki Ruri closed her eyes, and willed Yuuya to fly.

Seconds after the wish formed in her mind, the scrabbling fingers of her boyfriend’s other hand grasped the very tip of that Solid Vision sash, and he used the desperate kicking of his legs and the flapping of his first flailing hand to vault over the trap and flip back onto the safety of the front stage.

There was a heartbeat’s pause where no one moved as they absorbed the rapid swings their emotions had gone through. Another heartbeat passed where the crowd breathed in and out as one. Then–-

A sonic boom of cheers and claps.

Ruri opened her eyes and allowed herself a small smile. He’d done it again–-survived his evening show, kept the audience in suspense, and earned more than a few bucks for his college fund. Even knowing every time how the show would end (due to watching countless practice sessions with Yuuya and Yuushou) didn’t always keep her heart from fluttering anxiously until the city’s Father of Pendulum was safely on the ground.

She couldn’t help it; in their new world, it was the way she worried.

“Hey–-Ruri~!”

During her ruminating Yuuya had leapt off stage and moved through the bubbling crowd to get to her side. He had a grin bigger than the sun plastered on his face.

Ruri’s tiny grin didn’t grow an inch. Instead, she made a fist and planted it in his belly.

“ _Guh_ –-!”

“Kami-sama’s sake, Yuuya!” she hissed, letting others disperse around them while still keeping her voice low and her hand hidden. “I get that you love having the crowd on edge, but for the last time, stop cutting your save so  _close_!”

“Ruri–-”

“What happens if you really miss that last flip one day and become a Solid Vision pincushion?!”

“Relax, relax! Geez…” The bicolor-haired boy winced, still rubbing his stomach as he held up his hands in surrender. “I knew what I was doing. Our audience wasn’t as riveted on me when I backflipped through the fire rings, so I had to raise the stakes a little.”

“Yeah well, they’d be  _really_  riveted if you became an overfull piercing…. Just be more careful, okay?”

“I will, I will…  _maa, maa_ , you’re as bad as Yuzu.”

Ruri rolled her eyes, hooking an arm through Yuuya’s. “ _Please_. If Yuzu had the time off to see all your performances so far, you’d have a permanent crater in your forehead from that fan. Consider yourself  _lucky_  I didn’t aim any higher or lower!”

Yuuya paled dramatically. “Y-Yes, dear.”

His sheepish expression, coupled with the mild disappointment and expectation for praise radiating off of him, softened her up a bit and inspired her to kiss him. From the way he lit up so quickly and absolutely, even after their usual post-show bickering about safety, she knew that that was just the kind of applause he had been waiting for.


	2. concert (yuzu/reiji)

Hiiragi Yuzu had started her performance late.

It wasn’t her fault of course–-one of her pet peeves was tardiness, so she  _always_  set out for places early. But two traffic standstills and a belligerent tuba player had conspired to have her rushing onto the grand stage in pale pink swathes ten minutes ago, five minutes late.

She’d never felt so humiliated.

Silencing the murmurs of the crowd became first priority, and so Yuzu made no verbal apology; she merely removed her violin from its case and lost herself in tuning it,  _onstage_ , for a crowd of thousands.

In the VIP section far above, Akaba Reiji sipped some red wine and chuckled at her daring.

When she had finished fully scandalizing her audience with some truly obscene sounds on string, Yuzu hummed her way back in tune and actually started her concert, entrancing the crowd just as swiftly as she had disgusted them. Her arm flexed and her fingers danced expertly with the bow, creating intricate, shivery melodies that floated out into Maiami Theatre’s open air.

As he watched her play, Reiji hardly realized he had the same captivated smile on his face as the three thousand others he sat with. When Maiami’s Siren put on a concert, it often seemed as if it were for him alone, though he knew better.

The melody was a warning not to get too close, but the listener was lost before the warning was wrung from the song.

So it had been with him, the first time he had stumbled upon one of her professional shows and (at its close) immediately demanded an audience with the Fusing Diva he only barely knew through her association with You Show Duel School. Reiji had been lucky Yuzu’s good mood that evening kept her fan away from his face.

She  _had_ agreed to go out for coffee one day to discuss her music, though, and the rest was history.

* * *

Down at center stage, all Yuzu’s awkwardness had burned away under the glare of the spotlight, recreating her as the talented musical prodigy she’d always been.

Two hours had passed; it was nearly time to wrap up her current piece and bask in the audience’s approval before beginning her last, a sonata. Before she knew it she’d stalled her bow’s last slide across the strings, drawing out the last note for the pleasure of the people.

Yuzu caught the glint of red glasses high above as that note hovered in the air. Her blue eyes warmed a few degrees, and she smiled in a way that was only for the boy dependent on those glasses.

Reiji smiled back, just barely, and gave her a thumbs-up.

 _Excellent_ , he mouthed with the world between them.

 _Of course_ , she mouthed back, readjusting her stance.  _I only bring the best. See you tonight?_

 _Naturally. Don’t be late_.

Yuzu bristled from hairbows to heels–-but in lieu of an unflattering hand gesture or other blistering response, she put the bow back to her violin and started her next sonata, stopping the audience’s lingering applause in its tracks.

She’d get him back later instead.


	3. roleplay (gongenzaka/dennis)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Assumptions: Gongenzaka moved to Synchro after the war to train under Chojiro, but he still completes meet-and-greet official diplomatic missions for his home dimension. Dennis’s guilt had him to move to Xyz.

There’s a certain street corner in Xyz Dimension that Gongenzaka has learned to avoid.

Ever since he started coming here for diplomatic missions to get communication going between Xyz and Synchro, children in every district could be seen making a beeline for the area, shrieking and pulling each other along, waving Duel Monster cards. Adults smiled knowingly at him and shrugged their shoulders, knowing no toy or trinket could pull anyone away from That Street. The voice that boomed enticingly on loudspeakers in every neighborhood and refugee camp was a siren call to the kind of entertainment most Xyz denizens considered long-gone.

Problem was, every time Gongenzaka heard that voice or glimpsed That Street he felt an overwhelming urge to bolt in the opposite direction. And as a mature man, he did not ignore his urges.

He had gone out of his way to ignore Dennis Mackfield since the night the Entermage duelist revealed himself as their Academian mole. Letting Shun handle dueling him and the Tops handle quarantining him was much easier than confronting Dennis himself, roaring about betrayal, crying about broken bonds that the spy probably hadn’t cared about anyway.

It was simpler to pretend they hadn’t supported one another on the streets for days, shunned by Tops and Commons of all stripes. Easier to act like their little hero/heel duels to gather money and information had just been a joke, a necessity at most.

Dennis was the actor, but it suited Gongenzaka better to pretend that he cared as little about the spy as Dennis did about the rest of the Lancers.

* * *

His fellow Lancers followed his lead at first when they visited, keeping their distance from the one who’d risen twice from the ashes of defeat and slapped his mask back on as though nothing had happened. Serena called Gongenzaka but didn’t bother traveling to the dimension Dennis twice sullied with his entertainment. Shun rebuilt his home on the opposite side of town, and only mentioned Dennis in reluctant grunts. Tsukikage alone seemed to bear him little ill will, but he still tiptoed around the topic with Gongenzaka as well.

With this much time and attention devoted to squeezing past the elephant in the room, Gongenzaka is relieved that he never has any reason to go see Dennis’ new shows, that he hasn’t run into him by chance on any welfare visit.

He is.

Really.

* * *

 

Gongenzaka managed another two months of taking the long way around Xyz before he bumped into Dennis at the farmer’s market and dropped every legume, kale and tomato he’d taken pains to collect that afternoon.

“Go-Gon-chan… it’s you.”

The Steadfast Duelist grunted. Reluctantly he brought his eyes up to look over at his old comrade–-

“You look awful,” he blurted at once.

Dennis just laughed. “ _Aa_ , well food’s not as plentiful here and I’d rather the kids eat than me.”

But he really looked terrible. The burning orange of his hair was dimmed, a candle on its lowest wick. His multicolored suit was torn at the arms and legs and faded, like he’d been forced to wash and wear it over and over again ( _which of course he had, moron_ ). And though Dennis was wearing his trademark performer’s mask (lopsided now after their collision), the one blue eye Gongenzaka  _could_  see was rimmed with red.

He searched for something to say–- _anything_ –-but he was still weighed down by shock and residual bitterness, and the insistent feeling of  _not wanting to be here, not wanting to do this right now, do this ever_. So it was Dennis who ended up taking the initiative.

“Long time no see!”

“…”

“…you’re right, there’s too much in the past for a greeting like that to be okay,” the former spy amended hastily. “But you’re not making this easy for me either, buddy.”

“Don’t call me that,” Gongenzaka said, when he finally found his voice.

“Gon-chan. You’re saying we’re no longer friends?”

His fists clenched; his voice came out louder than he expected it to. “You expect me to believe we were ever friends in the first place?!”

Dennis flinched, the only sign of words well-aimed; yet his rejoinder felt just as accusing. “I’ll take that as a ‘no’. Is that… why you haven’t come to any of my shows?”

The world halted. If this had been a year ago, their Synchro audience would have gasped at the appearance of conflict like this in one of their shows. But now it was all real, and Gongenzaka was all done being anything that wasn’t  _furious_.

 _Your ‘shows’_.

“…Gon-chan? You’re normally a  _little_  more talkati–-”

“You think I don’t like you  _just because I didn’t come to any of your damn shows_?”

“Gongenzaka–-”

“You think I didn’t want to be around you because you use your mask and monsters to entertain the same kids whose homes and families and decks you destroyed?  _That’s_  why you think I’ve been avoiding you, why we’re not friends?”

“Gongen–-”

“THEY TOLD ME YOU WERE DEAD!” Gongenzaka roared, startling every living thing around him. Someone had put his face in a furnace, made him claw his way out. He felt overheated with rage, and yet not angry enough either.

“…They said you were dead,” he repeated, more softly but with no less heat. “I had to hear it from  _Kaito,_  the man who defeated you–-a  _stranger_. You couldn’t handle failing Academia by losing to Xyz users, but you weren’t man enough to ask Yuuya or Shun or  _me_  for forgiveness either. So you carded yourself.“

Silence all around. The fruit and vegetable sellers, spooked by his initial outburst, were several yards away and still running for the hills. And though he’d just called the person he cared for most a craven backstabber, the stern young man couldn’t help but notice that he was still standing there taking the verbal beating.

Still Gongenzaka pushed the words out, like boiling lava out of a volcanic throat. "You thought I was angry about you being a spy, Dennis Mackfield?”

“Well, that’s what everyone else has been avoiding me for,” Dennis said dryly, though he quailed again when Gongenzaka growled.

“ _I’m not everyone else_. I’m the one who was stranded with you in Synchro Dimension when we ended up separated from  _everyone else_. I’m the one you chose to stay with and feed, despite the fact that I’m a man and I eat twice your weight regularly. It was us who performed for the Tops and Commons for days, us who went underground together with that shady manager to find answers and reunite with Kurosaki.

"All that time–- _all that time_ –-you could have abandoned me for your real mission. You could have slipped away when we got arrested, or during our prison breakout. You could’ve grabbed Serena and we never would’ve suspected until too late. But you didn’t–-because you’d rather have put on a  _show_ , I guess.”

Dennis lifted and held out one hand between them, a lifeline he doubted would be grabbed.

“The show must go on,” he intoned. “It’s not just a silly catchphrase. It’s how I live my life. Entertaining people–or terrorizing them–-that’s just my role. I thought you knew that, Gongenzaka-san.”

“And  _I_  thought,” Gongenzaka admitted, “before and even after the truth came out, that you’d stayed with me because you  _cared_. About me. Not cared about me as a Lancer–-just about me.”

The boy from Academia blushed, and went eerily quiet.

“Dennis-–I never had any friends. Yuuya and Yuzu were the only ones outside my father’s dojo. But I was older than them, stronger, so I didn’t think I needed anyone else. I was the man Gongenzaka and I was going to inherit my father’s dojo someday. Before the Lancers, I never let myself think about making friends, or–-”

“Stop! You don’t have to say–-”

“I do,” Gongenzaka insisted. He’d spent too long being stubborn and shy and silent–-now, he had to  _say_. “You were annoying and too cheerful and secretive, but never helpless–-never needy. I never had to protect you or guide you. We were partners…. I  _liked_  that.”

Dennis’ expression shuttered closed. “The things you felt–- _feel_ –-were based on lies. Random chance. They–-” his throat seemed to catch. “They never would have worked out for you.”

 _Because_ you _never gave it a chance!_

“How do you know for sure, when you ran away before I could ask you…?” The anger in his voice was nearly gone now, replaced by hurt.

It was stupid to think that he could have acted like his time with Dennis hadn’t mattered-–that he hadn’t looked forward to dueling him for real one day, or going out to lunch together, or introducing the strange but enticing transfer student to his family.

“You acted so brave when we first met that I thought you were a different kind of man. A fighter–-when really you were a coward.”

“I wasn’t–-” But Dennis couldn’t even finish.

“Kurosaki beat you and you ran away–-no explanation, besides that stupid performance where you almost  _killed_  innocent people.”  _Nearly killed me_.  _But I chased after you with the others, straight to Fusion._  "Kaito beat you and you–- _you killed yourself_  rather than talk to anyone. You must’ve thought Academia would win and do who knew what with all those damned cards, but you still would rather have been  _sealed away_  than–-than talk.“

The vegetables were dropped back onto the street. Gongenzaka’s shoulders shook, but for once he didn’t care how he looked. The only person around to see him was a boy who had seen too much pain and suffering already.

He eventually felt a hand rest on his shoulder and rub in slow circles until he slowly un-tensed.  _Dennis_.

"Carding myself was my own decision,” Dennis reminded the both of them. “It wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t because of you, either.”

“Then–-why?”

He laughed mournfully. “I couldn’t live with myself, Gongenzaka–-with all the fires I’d started. So much sin. So little reason. I betrayed Kurosaki Ruri, and Yuuya, and the other Lancers, three whole dimensions, and  _you_. Everything I swung by with Trapeze Magician turned to ash. Even if everyone forgave me, even if  _you_  went against your own friends to defend me–-I couldn’t forgive myself.

"I’m not proud of my apology or of what I did–-but I’m not ashamed either.”

Gongenzaka asked hollowly, “What are you then?”

Dennis hesitated for a split second. Then his weak smile came back.

“I’m just the Entertainment Mage who performs on Cross-Over Avenue,” he said. “I wear the masks of hero and heel, and duel children to bring smiles to the people I hurt.”

“Smiles, not fear?”

“Not fear. Not anymore.”

Gongenzaka nodded. His insides shifted nervously. He’d wanted to yell at this man he liked and his wish was granted; he  _hadn’t_  wanted to show so much of his heart but it happened anyway. Who knew what would come up next?

“So you didn’t tell me,” Dennis said. "Why  _were_  you so angry at me?“

”…Because. You didn’t give me a chance to forgive you. You betrayed us and just left. You thought so little of me–-“

” _It wasn’t your fault_ ,“ Dennis repeated more firmly. "It was mine. And you were right. I  _did_  stay with you because I cared. In Academia… no one has friends. Just notoriety. You were the first for a lot of things… didn’t take long before I knew I’d rather see you hate me than be hurt by me.”

_Hate him?_

“And what about now?”

“Now… that’s up to you, isn’t it? It kind of sounds like you  _do–-_ uh–-hate me.”

“…But I don’t hate you.”  _I couldn’t. I can’t._

Dennis appeared to brighten at the admission. Even his voice lifted, in the way it used to for their audiences. As he bent down to retrieve Gongenzaka’s long-suffering purchases, a sliver of mischief entered his words. “Gongenzaka…~”

“What?”

“If you don’t hate me, there  _is_  something you could do to prove it–to show that  _maybe_  someday you  _could_  forgive me.”

 _You trickster. Barely a minute after being yelled at and your hand’s already back in the cookie jar_. “ _What_.”

“You could stop by Cross-Over Avenue on one of your relief runs,” Dennis suggested. Hesitantly, softly, carefully. “And maybe, uh, put on the costume I might’ve made for you when I heard you were around. Be my heel again.”

The idea pranced between them for a while, as both weighed the consequences and conclusions that would follow such an open and obvious peace treaty. But the ball was in Gongenzaka’s court, and he already knew what he was going to say.

So he took Dennis’ hand and shook it.

“I will come.”

* * *

(This performance had been a lot more raw and maudlin than their previous ones in Gongenzaka’s mind, perhaps because no audience mediated their feelings and actions; but if it  _had_  been pretend, he was sure they’d have earned their round of applause.)


End file.
